Title:
How abstract is early syntax?Abstract: Two contrasting
positions about children's early syntax are a) that it is not abstract and
consists primarily of word collocations that have appeared in the input and
b) that it is abstract and consists of syntactic categories in hierarchical
structures. I argue for the second position, using data from two-year-old
English-speaking children's spontaneous speech, two-year-old Hebrew-speaking
children's spontaneous speech, and three-year-old English-speaking
children's performance in a syntactic priming task. I consider the
implications of the results for the nativism-empiricism debate.

Title: Empathy, psychopathy, and fearAbstract: Why do people help or harm others? Many of us have
followed the trial of psychopaths like the BTK killer or the Craigslist
killer, or have marveled at the good works of real life heroes like Wesley
Autrey, the "Subway Superman," and have wondered why people like them behave
so cruelly or kindly towards others. Empathy is the emotional response
usually cited as promoting altruism or inhibiting aggression, but the term
has many meanings--from understanding others' thoughts to mirroring their
emotions to feeling compassion. I will be talking today about work that my
colleagues and I have conducted in both healthy individuals and those with
psychopathic traits that illuminates the mechanisms that lead to
empathy-relevant behaviors. I will focus in particular on emotional cues
like the fearful facial expression. This expression appears to elicit
empathy in those who see it. Moreover, highly altruistic people seem to
process the expression especially well, and individuals with psychopathic
traits process it especially poorly. I will discuss neuroimaging as well as
behavioral studies that suggest the mechanisms behind these patterns.

Title: Evaluating faces on social
dimensionsAbstract: The belief
that personality can be read from a person’s face has persisted over the
centuries. Moreover, social psychologists have accumulated evidence that
trait judgments from faces predict important social outcomes ranging from
electoral success to sentencing decisions, although these judgments are not
necessarily accurate. Why, then, do people make these inaccurate judgments,
and why are they made so reliably? In this talk, I will outline a
comprehensive model of evaluation of faces on social dimensions. According
to this model, trait inferences can be represented within a two-dimensional
space defined by valence/trustworthiness and power/dominance evaluation of
faces. Inferences along these dimensions are based on similarity to
expressions signaling approach/avoidance behavior and features signaling
physical strength, respectively, suggesting that trait inferences from faces
originate in functionally adaptive mechanisms. One interpretation is that
face evaluation involves an overgeneralization of adaptive mechanisms for
inferring harmful intentions and the ability to cause harm. I will also
discuss the potential neural mechanisms underlying face evaluation.

Title: Becoming Symbol-MindedAbstract:
Every
society has a wealth of symbols and symbol systems that support cognition
and communication, and all children must master a variety of symbolic
artifacts to participate fully in their society. My research shows that in
the course of learning to use various symbolic representations—including
pictures, models, and replica objects—infants and young children experience
a surprising amount of difficulty. They often fail to note the distinction
between symbols and their referents, behaving toward symbolic artifacts as
if they were what they stand for. The extended process of becoming
symbol-minded begins in the first year of life, as infants start to learn
about the nature of pictures: Through experience, they discover both what
pictures are and what they are not. Slightly older children have
substantial difficulty understanding and using scale models, but rapidly
come to appreciate the nature and use of this type of symbol. At the same
time, very young children make dramatic errors in which they try to interact
with a miniature representational artifact as if it were its larger
counterpart. Mastery of these different types of symbolic objects involves
developmental progress in multiple domains.

Title: How we do what we want:
An ideomotor approach to voluntary action.Abstract: Voluntary action is anticipatory and, hence, must depend on
associations between actions and their perceivable effects. This talk
provides an overview of recent behavioral, electrophysiological, and imaging
work from our lab on the acquisition and functional role of action-effect
associations in infants, children, and adults. It shows that action effects
are acquired from very early on and are still integrated spontaneously in
adults. Once acquired, action effects serve to select actions by means of a
network including the (developing) frontal cortex/SMA, connecting via
hippocampus to the perceptual areas that code for sensory action effects.
However, the impact and role of action-effect codes are regulated by the
agent's processing mode and intentions.

Title: The Evolution of Morality?Abstract: In “A Framework for the Psychology of Norms,”
Chandra Sripada and I developed a theory about the psychological mechanisms
underlying human norms. If that theory is on the right track, people will
often internalize norms that reduce their own biological fitness. It might
be thought that no such psychological mechanism could possibly evolve. But
that would be a mistake. In this talk I’ll explain why it was all but
inevitable that natural selection would lead to norm psychology in our
species, once we had acquired the ability to learn from one another. The
account I’ll offer explains why many human norms foster cooperative or
pro-social behavior. It also explains why many human norms lead to ethnic
hatred and morally repugnant behavior. If the account is correct, these
norms will be very difficult to dislodge. (Though I’ll present a brief
sketch of the Sripada & Stich theory at the beginning of the talk, the
“Framework” paper is strongly recommended as
background reading. This is available from the “discussion” page of the
Colloquium website.)